Business Analytics: Data Analysis & Decision Making

Practical technical tips guide student application of concepts to business. Insightful tips to help students apply chapter concepts to real business practices, decisions and planning are integrated throughout the chapter. Guidelines and insights range from general technical information to application-specific tips when using Excel, pivot tables, StatTools, Solver and @RISK. A 1-year license to Lumivero's DecisionTools Suite (formerly Palisade) comes with every copy of text or MindTap.

Numerous conceptual questions, problems and cases help ensure understanding. This edition offers approximately 200 conceptual questions, 1,000 problems and 40 cases for delivering students’ mastery of the material as they progress through your course. Complete Excel-based solutions are available for all of these conceptual questions, problems and cases.

Chapters are written to immediately engage students using interesting illustrations to set the stage for why the chapter’s concepts are important in today's business context.

Critical concepts and equations are set off in boxes throughout this edition to make future reference easier, emphasizing key topics for review and study. In addition, helpful margin notes and “Fundamental Insight” features emphasize the most relevant, practical information from each chapter.

Easy-to-follow, step-by-step examples highlight actual business challenges. This edition's extremely user-friendly approach includes more than 130 interesting examples drawn from real business situations or events. The solution to each example is worked out in a clear, step-by-step method that uses screenshots to make it easy for students to understand and replicate.

Emphasis on modern data analytics tools equips students for today's business world. In addition to covering traditional methods of data analysis, including summary stats, correlations, histograms, scatterplots and time series graphs, this edition emphasizes more recent digital tools for analyzing data. Students learn to use Excel tables and pivot tables, Excel’s Data Model and Excel’s Power Query and Power Pivot add-ins. They also get exposure to Power BI Desktop and the R language.

MindTap accelerates student learning. Provide engaging content, challenge every individual learner and build student confidence with MindTap -- the platform that gives you complete control over your course. The interactive eBook offers Excel examples, data file downloads and solutions files for select problems. This edition's MindTap offers more variety, depth, and the option to randomize homework assignments and practice problems with video tutorials created by author Chris Albright. New Excel activities are now available that give students hands-on experience solving problems as if they were on the job.

The new edition contains two newly written chapters expanding on Power BI tools, including Power Query and Power Pivot.

New chapters provide numerous examples illustrating how to use the Power Query Editor, including importing and transforming data in a variety of formats into Excel. All examples are accompanied by new step-by-step walkthrough videos.

A new chapter on Power Pivot provides many examples illustrating how to use the DAX query language to create professional business reports. Key topics, such as reporting year-over-year data, are covered using illustrations supported by walkthrough videos.

New sections detail how to perform key analysis, querying and reporting with the free Power BI Desktop software package.

Data mining coverage has been expanded to two chapters, focusing first on classification and second on cluster analysis and market basket analysis. Where relevant, the analyses are illustrated with Excel tools or available Excel add-ins. Other examples are illustrated with R code.

New optional appendices on the popular R language are provided. The primary emphasis of the book has always been, and continues to be, on Excel tools. However, this edition contains many appendices on using the popular R language to perform data analysis designed to provide students an advantage in jobs that require this skillset.

Chapters on statistical inference have been efficiently redesigned into a single chapter. Instructors will appreciate the condensed form that still covers the key topics needed for student success.